Tamil Nadu Governor Under Fire as TVK Seeks First Shot at Power
MA Baby says Raj Bhavan should invite TVK first; the fight is over who gets the first constitutional move in a hung Assembly.
CPI(M) general secretary M.A. Baby has told Tamil Nadu Governor Rajendra Arlekar not to “waste any more time” and to invite Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam chief C. Joseph Vijay to form government, arguing that the single largest party should be sworn in first and then asked to prove its majority on the floor of the House (
The Hindu; 
Newsdrum). In 
India, that is not a technicality: it is the entire battle over who controls the sequencing after a fractured verdict.
The leverage is with Raj Bhavan — for now
Arlekar has reportedly asked Vijay to produce letters showing support from 118 MLAs, the majority mark in the 234-member Assembly, before any swearing-in (The Hindu). TVK won 108 seats in the April 23 election, enough to make it the single largest party but not enough to govern alone (The Hindu; The Hindu). That puts the Governor in the gatekeeping role: if he insists on proof first, he can slow the transfer of initiative and force TVK to build a public coalition before taking office (The Hindu).
The politics around that choice are already widening. The News Minute reported that Baby reiterated CPI(M) remains firmly in the DMK-led alliance even as the party reviews the post-election situation, which means his intervention is about constitutional convention as much as coalition arithmetic (
The News Minute).
Why Baby is choosing this fight
Baby’s case is that the Governor should not decide the outcome in Raj Bhavan when the Assembly has not yet been tested. He cited the convention that the single largest party gets the first chance to prove a majority, and pointed to the 1996 Atal Bihari Vajpayee example, when the BJP leader was given 13 days before his government fell (Newsdrum; The News Minute). That precedent matters because it narrows the Governor’s room for manoeuvre: once the largest party is invited, the burden shifts to the floor of the House, where legitimacy is public and numbers are tested in the open.
There is also a local coalition logic here. TVK has already drawn some outside support, while other parties have ruled it out or are still consulting, which keeps the arithmetic fluid and the Governor’s discretion under scrutiny (The Hindu; The News Minute). That means the real contest is not just between TVK and its rivals, but between a party that wants the first claim on power and a Raj Bhavan that wants hard proof before handing over the keys.
What to watch next
The next move is whether Arlekar sticks to his demand for written support or invites Vijay to take oath and face a floor test. Watch the Left parties’ meeting in Chennai on Friday, because Baby’s line signals that the CPI(M) wants to defend constitutional procedure without abandoning the DMK-led camp (The News Minute). If no bloc can produce 118 MLAs, the Governor remains the crucial actor — and the delay becomes the story.
